Ideation Sessions: How we named Andi in an hour!
(Crazy 8’s + I’m a superhero + I’m a villain) x SERENDIPITY FACTOR
I have been working with M&C Saatchi over the last quarter to explore potential projects together + also spending time in a big agency environment.
I had the opportunity to see how AD-LAND gets creative to fundamentally connect with the human spirit.
During my time, I was invited to sit in on a number of projects however this time, it was different.
I got forwarded an email…(basically a brief & it turns out I was the “other person”).
The Brief
“Dear Mr Justin Tindall
Moray, Carrie & I were wondering if you would join us for a quick brainstorm to come up with a name for our new portal.
We are creating a place that the whole Network can access which houses all our expertise, past pitches, credentials, maps, creative work, fonts, templates & social feeds.
It’s called Bob at the moment so this half an hour is to see if we can come up with something not so very English!
I thought also maybe one other person could chip in…any ideas?
THX”
IDEATION > BRAINSTORMING
Walking into a room as a design researcher, referring back to the email I got forwarded. The expectation is to do some high energy & intensive brainstorming, the first thing which sprang to mind was to engage in ideation games.
From my experience, ideation games are a simple and effective mean to generating ideas. The only difference is when playing these games is the goal, it’s all about QUANTITY NOT QUALITY.
To name, Andi we generated over 100 potential names, shortlisted the best ones and then got creative.
This is how we did it:
Crazy 8’s
I use these all the time, however Crazy 8’s is a well known ideation game (well in design sprint world, it is). The aim is to create 8 distinct ideas in 8 mins.
Cool, nothing I can’t do. Time to look past your first few ideas, Bob, and get really creative with how you can do something.
Given the fact that we had the brief above, before playing Crazy 8’s — we needed to give ourselves some context.
We listed adjectives describing what we expected this new portal to be. Some of the adjectives we listed were:
- INFORMATIVE
- CONNECTIVE
- ‘SAATCHI’
- INSPIRE
- NOT SO VERY ENGLISH
- MAURICE AND CHARLES
- PERSONAL
- ENTREPRENEUR
This list was the stimuli to inform each round of our Crazy 8’s sessions. Everyone were to produce names which were informative, connective, Saatchi etc.
Everyone had a piece of paper folded 3 times making 8 boxes, however we had limited time (a hour) so we reduced the time from a minute in each box to 30 seconds.
We produced a stack of possible names such as:
…and many more.
Super Heroes vs Super Villains
When you pose the following questions to people, I find that you always produce some fun answers.
- If this product was a superhero what would its name be?
- If this product was a super villain what would its name be?
Admittedly, we were a bit fatigued from playing Crazy 8’s but we were having loads of fun so we continued.
Using the adjectives above to get inspired again, we had 5 minutes to get as many names down as possible for each question, so we just went for it.
Here’s some of what we came up with:
With finding villain names for this platform we realised we were tired so we stopped after a couple of tries.
During this exercise, we found that if we added ‘-OR’ to pretty much anything — we could make a villain name and within 45 minutes, we produced a crazy amount of content in a short space of time.
Voting
We shortlisted some of these ideas, we voted and kept the ones that stuck.
The voting process was straight forward. There was five of us in the room, we raised our hands for the ones we liked and kept or hands down for the ones which we didn’t.
We only kept the ideas which scored 4/5 or 5/5. It made for a pretty short list but that’s exactly the point.
SERENDIPITY FACTOR
For all of us in the room, as much as the other names were okay; there was something pretty cool about ‘MC’ and the ampersand (&) which was in frequent use throughout the hour of ideation.
So, here is how we eventually made our way to naming the platform Andi:
Maurice & Charles Saatchi
Maurice & Charles
Maurice & Charles & you
Maurice & Charles & me
& you
&y (And-y)
&info
&i (And-i)
Amazing right! (well I hope haha)
Takeaways:
- IDEATION > BRAINSTORMING
For us at Comuzi, we believe that brainstorming is an unorganised approach to coming up with ideas. Whereas with ideation, you have more tools to go about the process, such as games and ways of thinking. Yes, the difference is very subtle but I don’t think we would have come up a decent name. - Sometimes: QUANTITY OVER QUALITY is okay
Ideation in a short time frame means you do not have the opportunity to pour over and craft each individual idea to the best it can be, therefore having lot of options is your friend. - Adding ‘-INATOR’ to words can make a villain out of anything
I would love to know your thoughts on ideations games such as Crazy’s 8s + more. Hit me up — akil@comuzi.xyz or Akil Benjamin on twitter.
